Yandex joins Google, Yahoo! and Bing to collaborate on Schema.org

Yandex, Russia’s leading search engine, has joined Google,Bing and Yahoo! to collaborate on Schema.org. The initiative was set up in June 2011 to help web developers tag their websites to improve the display of the search results, which should make it easier for people to find the right web pages.

Schema.org aims to achieve that by adding specific HTML code into the webpage, which helps differentiate between things, persons, events, places, businesses and creative works amongst others. The full list of tags can be found here.

This is a good news for the webmasters looking for search engine optimization across different search platforms. Now the pages tagged with Schema.org tags will be picked up not only by Yandex search engine, but also its other services, such as Yandex’s Business Directory, Yandex.Dictionaries, Yandex.Images and Yandex.Video. Yandex shows the data from these services also in its search results.

Last week, Yandex released its financial results for the third quarter of 2011, quoting 62% increase in revenue for the first nine months of the year compared to 2010. The total revenue for the year 2011 to date is $423 million, with 28% of net profit margin.